The Campaign

Through a simple chroma-key AR app, everything magenta became an owned media channel through which we could take advantage of Gorillaz’ virtual status. When people pointed The Lenz against anything magenta, we served our audience with Gorillaz content, enriched by local offers. After all, it is much easier to create mountains of flexible, exclusive content when you are dealing with cartoons.
We turned the world magenta: fountains, buildings, grass. And created a whole new dimension of entertainment: from people gathering around magenta fountains to people sitting at home drawing magenta squares — we shared unique content through touch points that was uniquely ours: our brand colour!
Using our customers’ phones and a dab of magenta, we turned Europe into a stage for Gorillaz to enter the real world and reminded everyone of the power of our brand. This was further cemented by local product offers, served through the app.

Creative Execution

In order to drive downloads we needed the app to become famous by getting the campaign on everyone’s lips. So we launched in a big way — with magenta takeovers, and the world’s first live cartoon interview; all with a heavy PR-media push.
Suddenly magenta portals appeared across Europe and Europeans woke up to a new magenta reality that drove our key message:
‘Release Gorillaz with The Lenz. Download now!’
A message we delivered across OOH, digital, social with local influencers and print. Spearheaded by our app trailer, seeded across the Internet revealing the Gorillaz and Telekom partnership as being behind these iconic canvasses, we had created a campaign that enabled us to release geo-located product offers and Electronic Beats lifestyle and music content, as we created a whole new dimension of entertainment.
Our 11 markets could deliver a fully integrated participative campaign, with just a spray can of magenta paint.

In the first two weeks, before the launch of our market campaigns, we achieved 14 million impressions, 800,000 organic video views, 2,700 social mentions, based on PR and organic reach alone. With minimal media support the Lenz app is on over 130,000 phones across Europe.
But more importantly we were present on everything from socks to iconic buildings, hijacking our colour wherever it was found. Even ads from other brands who’ve had the audacity to use our colour.
We featured in Pitchfork, BBC, Rolling Stone and more for a total earned media reach of €20m.
But ultimately, our most important ROI is the one we can’t measure — how many media channels we created? Potentially millions: Wherever you see magenta, Telekom Electronic Beats are bringing you Gorillaz and local product offers in the most guerrilla way imaginable.

Our colour, magenta, is also our biggest brand asset. But rather than try to get magenta into more spaces than before, we decided to drive our least engaged audience (millennials) to look at magenta in a completely different way. So we turned our brand colour into a media channel. Using chroma key technology paired with AR to connect youngsters to a shared world of exclusive content using The Lens app. We partnered with the only band could truly help us, the world’s biggest virtual band – Gorillaz. Using peoples’ phones we turned everything magenta into a stage.

To build our relationship with Europe’s youngsters, we needed a partner who would be truly compelling with broad appeal.
We partnered with the forever-youthful virtual band Gorillaz. Real bands have fans that age with them, but the cartoon-drawn Gorillaz never age; and typically partner up with contemporaries who capture the zeitgeist, which keeps them relevant to younger audiences. In a partnership with such a compelling and loved band it would be easy to be overshadowed, forgotten or even rejected. Our strategy revolved around the need to be an important, welcome and visible part of things.
Rather than trying to share the stage with professional performers we decided to do something revolutionary. If we couldn’t be the content, maybe we could be the media channel.
With access to millions of European youngsters and the smartphones in their pockets, we had the perfect solution.